


Minotauros

by Wecanhaveallthree



Category: Warhammer 40.000
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-01
Updated: 2019-11-01
Packaged: 2021-01-16 04:44:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 8
Words: 18,662
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21265277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wecanhaveallthree/pseuds/Wecanhaveallthree
Summary: After a crippling assault by the loathsome Death Guard, the Minotaurs Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes make all haste for Terra to repair the damage done to their gene-seed. Little do they realise, they are being led into a far more insidious trap...





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Assembled (with great gratitude) by a good friend and fellow Reddit user, schmauchstein.

  
READ IT BECAUSE

Asterion Moloc, Chapter Master of the Minotaurs, is more than a mystery. See him here in brutal action, facing down the daemons within and without.

THE STORY

The Minotaurs are a dark presence even among the martial brotherhood of the Space Marines, known best for their role in punishing wayward Chapters who have turned away from the Emperor and Imperium. When the foul Death Guard poison the Chapter’s gene-seed reserves, the vital organs required to uplift new Space Marines, the Minotaurs are forced to set course for Terra to replenish their stores. But Grandfather Nurgle’s schemes run long, and the Minotaurs find themselves at a convergence of events, torn between duty and survival. Will Asterion Moloc’s scales of judgement be balanced, or will even the implacable Brazen Lord succumb to the corruption of Chaos?


	2. Burial Of The Dead

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I will show you fear in a handful of dust.”

There is a strange idea that rolls in the minds of men that death is merely the longest sleep. As if the wounds of life hard-lived would disappear on waking. As if that flutter of eyelashes that precipitates consciousness will wash away all ills. As if the soul departs from the flesh, travels and -- ultimately -- returns.

For years beyond count, beyond ken, this strange idea has endured. Funerary practices evolved around the sanctification of the mortal vessel, either to retain it for the soul’s return or to destroy it in an ordained way so that the soul could be free.

Look to the _Daedelos Krata_, relic-ship, fleet carrier, sole bastion of the Minotaurs Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes.

Look to her scarred prow and spattered hide, the result of sub-atomic detonations and metal-eating phages. Do not shy from her peeling paint and shattered superstructure: she has endured worse in her long life. She is not among the dreamers nor the dead. Her sight, grim and foreboding, is fixed on the Divine Astronomicon, the Great Beacon that shows the way to safe harbour. Terra, the Throneworld, beckons the _Daedelos Krata_ to an overflowing bosom.

She does not travel alone. A cortege of ships surrounds her, a solemn procession through the Warp, eldest daughters following close to a matron’s skirts. Their formation is a defensive one, a wounded one -- they have been hurt, and recently. How, and by whom?

Follow the trail of blood and buboes into a hardened heart.

We see witches dreaming in their bound caskets. Not every coffin is full, but where, oh where, are the former occupants? For them, the dream is over. They are stacked neatly, made presentable, by hooded serfs. For the first time their contorted, warped faces seem at peace. Their limbs are no longer gnarled with pain. The removal crews feel a stab of envy at this.

The dream shields their passage through the Warp. Pray that the movement beneath those lids remains rapid. Pray that Gellar’s ancient artistry holds. Pray that those who dream no longer do not follow this trail, too. And ask, oh, ask! Where are they buried? Where do the bodies go?

Climb the ladders, open the hatches, place ethereal fingers on gene-locked consoles -- ascend.

This is the realm of mortality, the racing, noisome mid-world. Fighter pilots in bronze war-helms slouch in low dives and bars, a dirty glass in one hand and a wide-awake stimpak in the other (for who knows when the call will come?). Great vaulted halls ring and echo with the ferocious drilling of combat regiments, and the shed blood and sweat reek of punishment. Boarders were not satisfactorily repelled. Mops and buckets are the weapons of the day. The open berths where friends, allies, comrades once were -- these places are avoided.

Where are the bodies? There are no answers from tight-lipped lieutenants, coarse captains. There are never any answers. What were those things that crawled and struggled within the _Daedelos Krata_, those snickering, spitting plague-bearers? And why did so many of them look like those above?

Those above, yes, those above.

At the highest levels of the mortal decks, one can feel the vibrations of a hundred ceramite boots marching in step. The defences are deeper here: servitor turrets, full-scans, phenotype examinations, random patrols.

The wounds here are the worst, and the least healed. Lines charred across bulwarks, inward-blown bulkheads, rusty stains and far worse sunken into the metal and mesh. Arming chambers destroyed, relics pillaged, the libraries corrupted -- and worst of all -- the sanctity of the Apothecarium breached.

The future smeared in virulent greens and browns. Plague Marines in all their guffawing glory, leaking foulness into every receptacle. Those that appeared untouched are the most harmful of all. Great lineages destroyed in a single act of malice and plague. The lines of heroes ended. For no Chapter can survive without the gene-seed, the Marine-maker, the ancient science that enabled galactic conquest. Without the careful preservation and maintenance of genetic purity, they become no better than the renegades they so often are called on to destroy.

Where are the bodies? Surely, at such a desperate time, the dead would all be here, harvested for their precious genetic gifts. Some stability could be extracted from this suffering. Some honour, at least, accorded to the fallen.

Up. Up, to the truth.

Slip past the idling autocannons of the Hecaton, their Contemptor chassis thrumming. It is said that the pilots are dead -- is this, then, their dream? These armoured hulks, the agony of intrusive neural networks, the insanity of isolation? Is this what a Space Marine sees when they close their eyes for that final time? Is this where they go?

Further in. Note the glyphs. Note the paintings. Note the sculptures and the statues. These passages twist and turn, a journey through the labyrinth of history without context. The looted treasure of uncountable worlds, their cultures, their traditions, their very memory stripped of every valuable thing. See here the Standard of Ushagal Deeps, that the Raven Guard believes forever lost. Take a moment to admire the golden tracework on this master-crafted breastplate, and ponder the meaning of the scratched-out pauldron. What mark of power armour could this bronzed prototype be? What battle does this wall-spanning art depict; are those golden warriors with crimson plumes simply a style, an exaggeration, or something closer to the truth?

Follow the invisible path. Seek the active connections, ever-shifting, ever reconnecting to new nodes in their paranoia. All lead to the heart of this maze. There are barriers everywhere: technological firewalls and kill-memes, pressure plates that release deadly gases and toxins or gouts of flame or plasma.

Here is a secret. Tap the bare walls. Taste the history, the composite materials, the archaic bindings, the elemental bondings.

This labyrinth is older than the _Daedelus Krata_.

Here, protected by traps and subterfuge and miles of the finest armour the Adeptus Mechanicus can forge, is the burial ground.

A step on threadbare carpet, ancient and worn by the firm step of Adeptus Astartes over millennia. The atmosphere is dry and thin, stripped of particular molecules that could carry disease or decay by vast, hidden filtration systems. The gloom is lit only partially, only by what light struggles out from the black heart of the maze.

Another step. The oppression presses here like a stone on a chest, the creaking of ribs, the struggle to draw breath. The light is tinged a bloody red, the cabling snaking away into the darkness pulsing like veins. Bronze staples secure optic bundles as if, given freedom, they would slither away into the labyrinth.

Another step. See the tethered servo-skulls, straining at their leashes as overflowing information thrums into their databanks. Their eyes burn like brands. Each primary servitor has its own constellation, each slack-jawed, drooling face twitching as it shunts power and purpose across the network, picking up, falling off.

None of them faces the throne. The brazen throne.

The steps are of marble, dragged from quarries before the invention of hauling devices, before the spread of technology. Deep cracks run through the stone, and something darker lies beneath, something that smells of crude forges and blood. A fine facade to the world, braced by iron and death. There is a lesson there.

The throne’s feet and arms are of beaten ceramite. No effort has been made to hide the metal’s origin, the layered hide of Space Marines. Squad markings are still visible. Here, an Ultramarine’s distinctive laurel. There, a crimson pauldron that could only be from a son of Baal. All of it is dull and indistinguishable from the greater mass, only identifiable by a fluke of creation. No care has been taken, no part of power armour has been chosen in particular.

Great warriors and their armour rendered meaningless, faceless, anonymous. Stricken of all honour and memory. All that remains of them is death. Death, and whatever dreams soften the skulls of traitors, heretics and renegades.

For here glowers Lord Asterion Moloc on his throne of the dead. The Brazen Warlord. Spear of Judgement. Satrap of _Daedelus Katra_. Bringer of Wrath, and a thousand other titles besides, every one dripping with menace and meaning like venom from a viper’s fangs. Around this dark titan revolve a series of data-screens and casualty reports and his bleak thoughts are, always, fixed on the balance of blood accrued by his Chapter.

Here is where the bodies are buried.

In streams of data. In binary caskets and buffer graves. In a mind as cold as winter, as ruthless as duty can be. All the lost souls terminate here, shivering and naked on electronic scales, stripped of everything before his consideration.

The primary servitor shakes and shudders, ejecting a new item onto the galaxy of hovering screens. It shows a small, rag-tag fleet. Ship classifications. Combat records. Relative threat. Alignment and allegiance. A transportation group bound for far-off Ultramar and the Lord Commander’s distant need. Sigils crawl into the feed: a newly-formed Primaris Chapter from the Ultima Founding. More of Guilliman’s whelps.

The scales swing with new information. Tactical objectives are added and subtracted. A cruel practical is applied to the optimistic theoretical. Need is weighed against need.

And judgement is made.


	3. A Game of Chess

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "And we shall play a game of chess / Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door."

One hand resting on the studded crown of his Empress, a dour expression creasing his transhuman features, Captain Gelit stared down a depressing position on the regicide board. There were still moves to make, of course: a thrust down the centrum with his Chevalier, or a defensive position that forced his opponent to commit more material to force the inevitable opening, or several other counter-movies.

None of which would lead to a victory: Geleit was trapped by his opponent’s expertly-played Guardian, intercepting a push on the Gate.

“I am not accustomed to defeat,” said Geleit, shifting his Empress into the trap awaiting her. “But I see no way forward from this position.”

“Oh?” replied his opponent, capturing the isolated piece and replacing it within the felt-lined wooden case. “And is that the truth, Captain, or are you trying to deflect me from your flanking strike?”

_Canny bastard,_ Geleit thought. “Regicide is all about truth, Advisor.”

That brought Advisor Krokata’s head up sharply, his tawny eyes glowing with mirth and vitality that belied the human’s ancient features. “Quite so. I have always appreciated the artistry of regicide, for in our dissembling and manoeuvring upon the board, we gain insight into ourselves, our weaknesses, our drives.” A long, slow, blink. “What truth have you learned today, Captain?”

“That you only lecture when you are sure of winning,” said Geleit, and began his gambit by unhooding his Warrior. A flurry of moves followed, a tide of exchanges that flowed back and forth across the board. With precision and patience, Geleit encircled and captured Krokata’s outlying pieces while the hooded Advisor refused to commit his Guardian before the final engagement. Geleit knew that the powerful piece could have turned the game against him with a daring deployment, but Krokata hunched around his Gate and Emperor protectively until nothing was left.

“Regicide,” Geleit announced, standing up to reach a gauntleted hand across the table. “A good game, Advisor.”

With a grimace, Krokata stood to accept the gesture with a distinct lack of grace. Tall even for the functionaries who walked the Imperial Palace, Krokata’s spindle-thin body was hidden within the deep folds of an unadorned, hooded black robe. He leant heavily upon a wooden heartwood staff, wincing at the crackle of joints. “A humbling defeat, Captain, though I thank you for it.”

With the match concluded, other heads in the mess hall turned guiltily back to their own entertainments. Geleit was not ignorant to the eyes of other Space Marines on him, the almost-worshipful stares that followed a former member of the Unnumbered Sons.

That first wave of Primaris had served Lord Commander Guilliman, the Avenging Son, during his Indomitus Crusade, more than a century of fighting to retake Imperial territory lost as the Great Rift opened across the galaxy. Those who had survived that grand campaign were already becoming heroes in their own right, veterans whom the next generation looked to for guidance and inspiration.

Captain Geleit - recently Sergeant Geleit, so recent that he had yet to requisition a suit of Gravis power armour and remained in his battle-scarred Tacitus plate - still found it hard to think of himself as inspiring.

“Are you coming, Captain?” asked Krokata, as the mess hall’s primary door hissed open at the Advisor’s limping approach. “Or have you finally tired of Solon’s interminable briefings?”

Two of Geleit’s Honour Guard fell in behind the Captain and the Terran as they strolled without haste towards the _Northern Chariot’s_ strategium. Flickering lumen strips bordered the high, vaulted corridors of the strike cruiser’s ventral decks. There were still sectors of the ship undergoing finalisation, with the occasional red-robed Adeptus Mechanicus adept fussing over a communications junction or tertiary node.

The new vessels sailing from Mars’ Ring of Iron were much like the Primaris themselves -- untested, but all the more eager to prove themselves because of it.

“Every piece is important,” Geleit said with a half-smile as Krokata shooed a servitor out of their path. “You considerations lack depth in that regard, Advisor.”

Krokata looked back with all the beneficence of a saint. “I would say it is you who does not place enough importance on the pieces, Captain. Without the Emperor, the game cannot go on.”

“I meant that you nursemaid your Guardian at the expense of others. You cannot win without sacrifice.”

The thin human shivered as if a sudden chill had settled in his bones. “Do not speak to me of sacrifice, Captain. The Throneworld is one great altar. The Guardian must stand at the end.”

“Perhaps you have spent too long in the company of the Custodes, Advisor.”

“No doubt,” Krokata’s smile matched the Captain’s own. “They are terrible regicide players.”

* * *

Commodore Solon surveyed the strategium array from an unadorned grav-throne, his warped torso a mass of tubing and implants as it terminated directly into the machinery. The Commodore’s arms were truncated stumps, his face a crater of scar tissue, all with the distinctive puckering of void trauma. Breath wheezed into several contracting sacs nestled on the throne’s exterior, and he spoke in a voice synthesised directly from a ravaged throat.

There was little joy left in Solon’s life. Only duty. And so he ordered frequent briefings and invited -- for one did not make demands of the Adeptus Astartes -- Captain Geleit to attend each and every one. Being the senior officer present, he made a conscious effort to appear engaged and interested and so set a good example of cooperation.

Geleit and Krokata had arrived just as the Commodore had begun, and thus earned only the mildest of reproaches as they took their customary positions - Krokata to squint up from the base of the holo-display among the senior Naval officers, and Geleit closest to the door.

The strategium was dominated by the complex display, the finest of technological advancements coming from Mars. Multiple adjacent screens held rolls of data, all relevant to the topic at hand and all easily visible for any officer in the tiered seating. Tradition being what it was, however, all present had elected to remain standing and jostling at the machine’s base, missing out on the broader scope and greater benefit.

“These engine signatures are Imperial,” Solon’s synthesised voice had not even a hint of inflexion as he spoke. The screens slowly scrolled through a possible list of warships that fit the sensor profile. “Though that means little in this age of heretics and traitors. There are no reported allied forces operating on this Warp current at this time, but that also means little given what effect the Maledictum has on shipping. I would hear your thoughts.”

It was more likely than not that the Commodore was privy to sensitive information not made publicly available. Such tests of identification and character were common in the upper echelons of Naval command. In the past, duels were fought, commanders would throw each other out of airlocks and replace the campaign wine with poison. By comparison, the ruthless public shaming was considered healthy internal competition.

Geleit took note of those clamouring to speak, their allegiances and unconsciousness cliques. The younger officers took cues from each other when they were not feuding, their modern fashion -- high boots and tailcoats -- making them seem a flock of strutting gulls. In contrast, the senior fleet officers were islands of calm measure, each an individual in both poise and dress.

If he had been anything but a transhuman warrior of the Imperium, Geleit would have found it all unbearably juvenile. Despite all the Lord Commander’s insistence, politics remained a field in which Geleit would only ever be considered adequate.

Truly, that was the word that held him back from contributing his own thoughts to the briefing: ‘adequate’.Geleit could admit that he lacked the madness of unaugmented mankind, the pop and crackle of true ingenuity. He had earned his honours as a stalwart defender of vital supply lines during the Indomitus Crusade -- his appreciation for void war was genuine and distant as only a layman could be -- but he was well aware of the gulf that separated him from true masters.

Void warfare was, many venerable admirals of the Imperial Navy would quote in their memoirs, like regicide. The stately movement of distinct pieces over a flat plane, each with a known value and strength. Manoeuvres that had gained their own names: the courageous Spire’s Gambit, so-named for a hero of the Gothic War. Lubwitz’s Defense, popularised by a flag officer of Battlefleet Ultima and her stalling tactics against Hive Fleet Leviathan.

Put down on creamy vellum, words scratched by auto-quills, void war appeared neat and ordered. Far removed from the madness of ground combat. It took on the aspect of nobility, of poise and consideration.

It was a lie.

Behind those careful words, behind the calm grey eyes of retired naval commanders, burned an unmistakable heat and passion. Scribes would trade nervous looks as the object of their attention would trail off in the middle of a dry discussion on fleet operations. Nearby, their retainers -- men and women who knew their masters well, had served loyally -- would shy knowing smiles.

Juvenile, perhaps, but that fire was something Geleit could respect. Throats burned with orders and ozone, heads straining forward like hunting dogs over consoles and pict-screens and cogitators. Imperial predators making their kills.

The strategium display changed to reflect the battlegroup’s current disposition. _Northern Chariot_ leading, the destroyers _Keeper of Keys_ and _Melt’s Raiment_ rotating their positions and sensor watch to cover all angles. In their care, the vast bulk of the _Caravanesi_, a void freighter brimming with material supplies for Ultramar.

On auxiliary screens, calculations and probabilities continued their stately march.

“So,” began a young officer, flicking imaginary dust from her cufflinks. “There’s been a change to match our course. What of it? We’re well ahead of any potential interdiction and not even the Archenemy’s corsairs would risk our guns in a turbulent Warp run.”

“And show our backs?” snarled another young buck, “You would have us run without firing a shot, Yulai? I’m not surprised, considering your service record.”

Before the offended officer could finish spluttering out a challenge to first blood, Commodore Solon’s chair emitted a high-pitch squeal that overrode the bluster and argument. When the strategium had returned to calm, his distorted voice crackled again. “All opinions have merit. I will not brook this squabbling.”

A senior officer in golden frogging looked up from his own calculations. “If I may, Commodore?”

“Speak.”

“We cannot rely on total stability of the Warp route through to Ultramar,” the senior officer continued, looking for and receiving permission to alter the strategium display. The overlay withdrew to show a large-scale situation map of the sector. “Reports indicate that the Archenemy is using devices similar to those employed near Terra to alter or destabilise reinforcements to the Five Hundred Worlds. If we are being hunted -- and I believe we are -- then we are likely being led into an ambush, to be becalmed and taken at their leisure.”

The senior officer manipulated the auxiliary displays to narrow the possibility of the pursuing forces, focusing on high-tonnage vessels.

“Furthermore,” he continued, “It is likely we are facing an opponent with both a strategic and real advantage in terms of arms. Sensor profile indicates either several cruisers or a fleet carrier and escorts. We could fight clear of the first possibility, but we do not have the corvettes to properly engage a carrier group. Without information, however, we can make no clear decision. I propose we turn and make contact. If we encounter allies, excellent, and if not, the _Northern Chariot_ can delay any pursuit long enough for the _Caravanesi_ and escorts to evade.”

There was a moment of silence, then the strategium burst into an uproar of counter-plans, tactical assessments and insults. But the tone had been set, and the facts laid bare -- Geleit did not need to wait for the conclusion to know that an engagement was forthcoming. He turned away, preparing to don his helm and order his Lieutenants to ready the company for action.

Before he did, Geleit caught Krokata’s sad smile, the Advisor looking directly at him and mouthing the word ‘sacrifice’.

Such was the way of things.

Nothing was achieved without risk, in regicide and war alike.


	4. The Fire Sermon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "To Carthage then I came / burning burning burning burning.”

Cool air blows over the naked body of a Legionnaire sat cross-legged upon soft grass. Scars from a life of war mark his body: burns and blades and esoteric language that no mortal mind remembers. The waves lap hungrily at the shore, stealing morsels of land - their hunger is a reminder of his own. He has not taken sustenance for some time, and even the superhuman physiology of the Adeptus Astartes requires fuel to feed life’s spark.

This does not worry him as once, perhaps, it would have. He has come for truth or death (which is, in its way, a truth as well).

The soulwell, the sole structure on the tiny island, is silent as it has been since his arrival.

He has given it everything he has.

First, his anger, his hurt, his betrayal: he raged and spat and cursed all of life, all of creation. The bastardry of fathers, the ignorance of brothers, the schemes of power-mongers -- he stormed about the isle, boots sinking deep into soil and sand, roaring his frustration like a dying lion.

“I carried the Word!” he yelled at the uncaring stone, “I found the Truth! Is this my earnest payment? Is this my just reward? I have served and fought and lost and fled! I have sacrificed and sung! I have burned!”

He tore the helm away, seals ripping, feed-pipes popping free, exposing his battered face to the uncaring sky. Livid marks stand out on his blotchy skin, radiation burns that will never fade. Milky cataracts swim in the deep blue of his eyes: he has stared into the unblinking sun of Calth, and it has marked him forever. He had fought in those caves below the world’s surface, the tunnels and dead-ends, emptied them of enemies as he now emptied his burdened heart.

With a final furious shout, he flung his helmet into the well. Ceramite rang hollow against stone as it bounced from one side, and then - silence. No splash of water. No rattle against an empty pit. Not even the muted thud of metal meeting dirt.

Silence. Sweet, blessed, affronting silence. Nothing but the whisper of wind and the caress of water. This is the answer to his devotion, his pain, his suffering: silence.

“Lorgar never intended us to survive,” he admits to the well’s confidence, “He fears the truth he found in the Eye. He is an unwilling apostle. He is caught between two stones of his own design, belly-up to the world, begging to be gutted. He should have died on Istvaan.”

The warrior stalks about the isle again. He circles like a caged animal. Once, twice - it becomes a comforting ritual to stamp out his own tracks in the sand. He paces, fingers tugging at the fastening of his weighty jump pack. On the sixth pass - or the seventh, or the eighth, or the ninth, for time and distance are soft here - he pulls it loose, and with a grunt, tumbles it into the well.

The jump pack scrapes along one sheer wall, shrieking, before falling out of sight.

Once it had been his badge of office, that which set him apart from even his brothers. The unique markings of the Ashen Circle stood out like welts on his armour, like the blood from a penitent’s flagellation. Once it had brought him nothing like pride. Now- now- it disgusts him. As if it were one enormous parasite feeding on him, syphoning away his life, its fangs mating the intimate ports of his Black Carapace.

A wave of nausea shakes him. He begins to tear at each piece of machined plate. Gauntlets unlatch and disappear into the well. Pauldrons come loose and follow. Section by section, with an increasing sense of relief and freedom, he strips himself of all accoutrements. Piece by piece, they are fed to the gaping mouth before him.

He watches the last possession - his cherished axe-rake - fall until it goes beyond even his superhuman sight, blood springing from skin cut on the well’s sharp inner edge. He cannot help but think of teeth.

“Am I free now?” he asks the answerless edifice. “Of those bonds I would never break? Am I traitorous as Lorgar, an equally unwilling apostle? I am sickened by these truths. Monarchia is ruin. Colchis will follow. Is this our legacy? To make our converts ash and dust and nothing more? Is the truth so vile that oblivion is preferable to worship?”

The unasked question comes to his mind: _will I die here?_

The thought does not trouble him as once, perhaps, it should have.

* * *

“We’re dropping Warp travel to verify course heading,” said Perion Calus, Second Captain of the Wayfinders Chapter and master of the battle barge _Aniwa’s Ascendancy_. “The convoy is too sluggish to outpace us, but speed will work against us if we overshoot.”

No reply was forthcoming from the other Marine sharing the raised dais. There rarely was. Perion had expected a more hands-on approach from their nominal commander, but for the most part, the black-armoured warrior allowed the Wayfinders to do their duty without interruption or interjection. Off the bridge was another matter, but Perion was grudgingly impressed with the quiet professionalism.

_More men like this in the Imperium,_ he thought, _and we wouldn’t be turning our colours._

“Shipmaster,” he spoke aloud, “Take us out. Full combat readiness.”

Blast shutters began to drop over the weakest sections of the bridge’s superstructure, and great seals descended over the main door. Dropping from Warp was the most dangerous point of translation, where the barrier between the material world and the hellish dimensions beyond was breached. Spectral claws groaned over the battle barge’s hull as the unknowable beings sought to draw their prize back. The vessel shuddered, Gellar fields flickering as it pulled itself free.

Something reached through a communications console, long and spiked, and slurped up a crewmember before they had time to scream. A faint, mocking laugh faded as reality asserted itself once more.

Before anyone could relax, a higher-pitched alarm began to blast. Screens sparked to life, the star-map fizzing as it attempted to make sense of the data coming in from the _Aniwa’s_ own sensors as well as that shared by its skirt of escort cruisers. Nearby stellar cartography was poured over by monotasked servitors, linked at the speed of thought to banks of cogitators.

It was too slow to save the _Heartwater_. Even as the furthest cruiser desperately signalled for aid, its void shields sluggish in lighting, it was dead. A ferocious volley of macro-cannon fire stripped the unprotected generators from its iron hide, followed by precision lance strikes to vital systems, with a high-yield volley of torpedoes lowering the curtain on its short, sharp fate.

The _Heartwater_ tore in half, overloaded reactors gutting the ship in a chain reaction that caught its nearest sister, the _Hirothar_, in an explosive halo.

“Get me signatures and identities!” roared Perion, slamming one massive fist on the bridge railing. “Signal the formation to break! Don’t give them another alpha strike!”

“Lord!” coughed a communications officer, anticipating the order, “Imperial vessels not, repeat, _not_ the convoy! We’ve been interdicted by… looks like a fleet carrier and escorts, lord!”

Perion’s mind raced through the possibilities. They had dismissed a previous sensor image of such a fleet as a mere ghost return - common, these days - and had every assurance that no other Imperial presence was anticipated in this time window. The Wayfinders had pillaged every source of information they could on their traitorous turn; the only vessels that should have been on this Warp route were their prey and, far behind, whatever the Imperial Navy had managed to send in pursuit.

Another shudder wracked the _Aniwa’s Ascendancy_ as another volley began to strip the battle barge’s void shields. Their opponents had elected to leave the crippled _Hirothar_ and focus their fire on the obvious flagship, hoping for a quick end to the battle.

They would, Perion grinned savagely, have to go disappointed. The Wayfinders were void specialists and their vessels and crews were veterans all.

“Full ahead,” Perion ordered the helm, “Take us in close where their range won’t count. Has the carrier deployed yet?”

A different officer responded this time. “Aye, lord, we have confirmed launches. That’s a dedicated bomber wing coming up-” a pause; “-on our blind! _Hirothar_ reports unable to engage with close-range defences, they’re out of position and drifting hard, steering offline. On our flank-” another pause; “-_Clearway_ reports racks near-ready and launching, but can’t intercept the first pass.”

Perion nodded and looked meaningfully at the communications officer. “Identities?”

The officer was caught in a state of shock. Perion raised his voice over the wailing klaxons. “Kolat, do you have identity confirmation?” The slack jaw closed and eyes blinked.

“Lord, fleet carrier is the _Daedelos Krata_, Minotaurs Chapter -- lord, they fired point-blank at an Imperial signature. It’s impossible than an astropathic communication got ahead of us after we destroyed the relay at Volk, so-- lord, are these renegades too?”

_Seven hells._ Perion gritted his teeth. He was familiar with the dark history of the Minotaurs. More familiar, in fact, than many other Space Marines. Roboute Guilliman may have turned his back on the sacrifices and service of the Adeptus Astartes in favour of his bastard Primaris, but Marneus Calgar was still a man worthy of respect -- and the Minotaurs had insulted the Ultramarines Chapter Master grievously.

Perion had not anticipated such an opportunity for revenge. Not in the name of the Imperium, but for the sake of honour and dignity -- the only things that still held meaning for the Wayfinders now.

“Not renegades,” he snarled. “Worse. The lapdogs of Terra. They must have sniffed us out - bad luck for them. It’s past time somebody put them down. Anything else to report?”

“There are Storm Eagles in that bomber formation, lord.”

“Boarding already? Eager, I’ll give them that. Stand by for borders, then, and get our formation back in place. Vox _Clearway_ and tell her to keep her side -- we’ll clear our own space here. Get _Isle of Tell_ and _Foamfollower_ up on the fleet carrier’s escorts. We’re harder than they are, and now’s the time to prove it.”

Perion spared a glance sideways and found himself alone on the dais. He nodded to himself. Quiet professionalism. Aye, he liked that. And no doubt his companion was itching for a chance to come face-to-face with proper Loyalists. Take a few skulls, or whatever it is that they did. Perion turned his eyes and his thoughts back to the tactical overlay and the battle at hand.

* * *

The well was silent.

But there was a new sound, now.

Opening his eyes was an effort that he had believed beyond him: he slipped in and out of the healing coma as his superhuman body cannibalized itself. Life was a fearsome thing and would not let him slip away to whatever truth awaited beyond -- he was as much a fixture on the isle as the well he sat before. Perhaps his bones would lie here for another thousand years; the concept of time was entirely beyond him.

“Rasek,” said the intruder. “Hermit of the Isle. They never said _which_ isle, which made finding you rather difficult. I hope you appreciate the effort.”

Rasek. Yes. That was his name. He had thought it gone forever, given to the well. Rasek. That is how he was known by brothers lost and fathers damned. Yes. Rasek. Colchis. The Ashen Circle. The memories dripped into his skull like pure water from a mountain brook.

Who had come? He had not the strength to turn, and when he looked, he could make out only the haziest of outlines. Black armour, a powerful presence, but - no more than that.

“Did you find what you were looking for?” the intruder asked in a companionable tone. “Any kind of truth?”

“Chaos…” Rasek began, voice broken and cracking like an untuned instrument. “...tests weakness. It is like the water around this isle. It flows into cracks. It erodes stability. Chaos is a ring of spears that face inwards and out. We are trapped by it. The more we struggle to be free, the more we are wounded.”

Silence. Had he imagined it? Was his mental state as ruined as his body? Was he inventing the murky figure before him, casually looking into the well? Perhaps. He found it difficult to care.

At length, the intruder spoke again. “And what of you, Rasek? What is your truth?”

“Have you heard it said that nature abhors vacuums?”

The intruder nodded and beckoned for Rasek to continue.

“So, then, it must follow that nature welcomes even Chaos. The world is built on more lies than what the Emperor told us. So that is my truth. The creation of space. I do not seek to fill it with pithy words or sermons. The void, in and of itself, is enough. An untouchable space of silence.”

Another nod. “Yes,” the intruder replied, “I can understand that. You’d burn it away if you could, wouldn’t you? Not all of it, but enough to make a clearing. A place of peace.”

“A strange sentiment for our kind, I’m sure.”

“We might have more in common than you think, Rasek Firespeaker.”

And for the first time, Rasek beheld the intruder properly. The jet black armour. The brassy eight-pointed star on pauldron and chest, proudly. No stink of corruption or decay. No deceit. No betrayal. No schemes of power, for the warrior before him _was_ power, pure and unrestrained. He had only seen it once, long ago -- in the small way he could still grasp time -- and felt… humbled, by consideration.

“Ezekyle?” Rasek asked, in his scorched voice.

The silence was answer enough.


	5. Death By Water

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "O you who turn the wheel and look to windward / Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you."

Captain Perion watched the oculus closely, transhuman senses dividing his attention between attack, counter-attack, situation reports, velocity, drift -- all the necessities of void war. He calculated the relative time to bring his close-range weapons to bear. He noted the position of armsmen and Space Marines alike moving to reinforce critical systems in preparation to repel boarding parties. He held it all like a pristine globe in his mind, a jewel whose facets only he could appreciate.

“Tighten those voids,” Perion growled, finger jabbing at fluctuating shield layers that had escaped even the cogitator’s notice. “Forget the bombers. They only get one pass before _Clearway’s_ fighters scratch our back. Let the Eagles breach, an attempt with those numbers is suicide. _Krata_ is the sole threat: keep your eyes on her.”

_Aniwa’s Ascendancy_ rumbled again as the drives spun up, fuelling the battle barge’s acceleration into her own optimal range where the opponent’s long-range lances and torpedoes would be answered by overwhelming cannon broadsides.

In fleet engagements, carriers like the _Daedelos Krata_ counted more than battleships with their ability to hound and harry enemy positions. They were like the elite spear-casters that served the war-galleys of Lantos, Chapter planet of the Wayfinders and Perion’s birthplace. Masked in bronze, clad in torcs and feathers, the _Ku’ialu_ could slay officers with impunity. Their poisoned javelins were the bane of seafarers on all eight oceans.

Should an opponent close with ram, hook and grapple, the _Ku’ialu_ would be targeted first. If captured alive, their deaths were never clean. At arm’s length, they were the most lethal warriors that rode the waves. At knife-point, they died like anybody else.

On the oculus, the bomber wing began their attack run, their cross-thatched icons moving into terminal range.

“Hard brace!” called Perion to the bridge crew. “Ride the wave, Wayfinders! Let me hear it!”

“Proud to serve!” came the response from every mouth capable of speech as restraints were buckled and stations secured. Klaxons wound down their howled proximity alerts, servitors ceased to gurgle urgent launch warnings. The whole ship held its breath.

* * *

The discipline of the _Daedelos Krata’s_ bomber wings was unshakable. Starhawks were large and slow, prime targets for point defence and the dedicated anti-voidship weapons of destroyers and corvettes. They seemed almost toylike against the vast bulk of _Aniwa’s Ascendancy_, a child’s poorly-sculpted models flung into real warfare.

But the gaps in the battle barge’s void-shielding and anti-ship weaponry were deliberate and exposed even the mightiest vessel to the full power of a Starhawk’s plasma bombs and missiles.

They leapt from racks and rails like a thousand spears, the bent arm of the _Ku’ialu_, burning towards the _Aniwa’s_ unshielded belly, a silvered cloud of splinters all seeking soft flesh. The few surviving batteries threw a desperate storm of las and hyper-accelerated slugs, meeting with mild success, explosions blooming like flowers in the oncoming swarm as weapons detonated before reaching their target.

It was nothing like enough. The first detonations were angular, glancing from reinforced hull plates and ablative armour - flesh wounds. The next wave struck true, opening great burning wounds in the battle barge’s flank, gouts of fire telescoping out and in like an assassin’s dagger. Whole sections -- billets, storage rooms, maintenance - depressurised, drawing breath from lungs, exposing mortal flesh to the void’s chilled kiss.

Worse still were the seeded munitions, hideous weapons of gas and toxin. They burrowed deep into secured quarters and released their lethal poisons. Flesh buboed and cratered, eyes boiled away, blood flowed from every orifice -- the Minotaurs fought with every advantage in their arsenal, no matter the morality of such hideous tools.

The Wayfinders were veterans all. Rather than trying to hold a saturated landing point, the hard-suited Guard and Space Marines had fortified themselves behind bulkheads and strong-points outside the immediate blast radius.

Before the _Aniwa’s Ascendancy_ could even begin to howl its pain, they were storming down shuttleways and reinforced umbilicals to fortified positions. They would strike the Minotaurs boarding parties in a place they believed to be extinct of life; they would fight back before the invaders even began their assault in earnest.

It was a cunning stratagem, but a flawed one. Perion’s counter-attack relied on his knowledge of the Storm Eagle gunship, the older brother of the more common Thunderhawk. To every sense he possessed, the Minotaurs gunships were precisely that: heavy transports that could ship twenty Marines in combat readiness, armed with anti-personnel Heavy Bolters and the dreaded Vengeance missile launcher.

Weapons that would not pierce a Terminator’s mighty armour.

Perion had dispatched two squads of the Wayfinders First Company in their ancient ritual plate, storm-shields and hammers in hand, to meet the Minotaurs landing and push their foes back out into the void.

Fully believing in their invincibility, the Terminators pounded from their fortified positions just as the first Storm Eagle lowered its ramp.

Empty.

The cannon emplacements beneath its slanted wings began to glow with the tell-tale warm-up of lascannons. Atop the landers back, the wicked gleam of twin-linked anti-armour krak launchers.

With the disposition of forces focused on repelling a non-existent boarding action, key junctions and stations were left undefended. Perion had planned a rolling retreat as contingency -- his forces had clear lines to the areas he had elected to leave in mortal hands for the moment -- but the _Aniwa’s Ascendancy’s_ charge to bring itself into cannon range had crossed a particularly lethal threshold of its own.

* * *

Shaken but unharmed, the bridge staff began to repower and calibrate their consoles. Perion had staggered but not fallen from his place on the raised dais: it would not do to stumble, even under these circumstances.

Though the fear had been gene-coded out of him, Perion still felt a sense of trepidation as the oculus flickered back to life. _Are we holed? Are we sunk?_ he thought, eyes scanning the incoming damage reports and casualty lists.

Perion was brave by any standard. A stalwart warrior of the Imperium, he had faced uncountable horrors within the galaxy. Indeed, it took an enormously valiant act to break free from the Corpse-Emperor’s grasp and strike out to find truth and honour for the Chapter. He had accepted the black warrior’s words, pledged his men to the Vigilus campaign and ventured forth. All these were acts of bravery.

There is a doom that is harder by far to shake for any who had grown to maturity upon a planet as clad in oceans as Lantos. Through the hypno-indoctrination, through the gene-coding, through the endless modifications of body and soul, Perion still hesitated a microsecond before he asked for the truth.

“Helm? How are we headed?”

Thalassophobia. Fear of the great void. Fear of being far from land. Fear of being left to drift forever, unable to fight, unable to die as his transhuman physiology sunk into its healing coma. Death by inches, by degrees, by point and compass.

Death by water.

The wizened master of steerage coughed and thumped her chest. “Course is good, Captain. We’re still sailing.”

Perion had no time for relief before the fluctuating energy readings on the oculus spiked far beyond tolerances. He had felt it before the truth reached his eyes. The thunderous pressure in his skull, the taste of blood and iron in his mouth, the popping of pressure in his ears. The way his body automatically tensed, combat-stims surging into his bloodstream. He reacted automatically before his conscious mind understood the situation, throwing himself from the dais.

A ring of fire nearly severed Perion’s legs as he dove clear of the matter transmission field equalising with the _Aniwa’s_ bridge. A crack as though reality were a pane of glass, breaking in cold weather. A murky green light like the siren-lures that called ships onto reefs. The fog-choked bell of buoys, alone on the waves. Lurching steps on a creaking deck. The body in the nets. The greenish pallor, the crab-eaten, sea-rotted face--

A giant strode through the dying flames. Nine warriors in power armour flanked him, weapons low.

“Full fathom five thy father lies.” The voice that echoed from the Tartaros suit-vox was cold-hammered iron, brutal and unbending. “Of his bones are coral made.”

Asterion Moloc’s bronzed storm-shield carried a device of the ancient Terran Haelac, that long-lost tribe. His colours were of war-beaten gold. The horse-hair that plumed his Iron Halo were red and white, triumph and conquest. Horned beasts crowned his greaves and right pauldron. Fantastical musculature embossed his breastplate; leather kilted his waist.

In one mighty gauntlet was the Black Spear, a relic blade soaked in the blood of entire Chapters of Adeptus Astartes who had turned from the Emperor’s light.

In its construction were all the design sensibilities that informed the weapons borne by the Adeptus Custodes of Terra. The balanced haft. The charged laser upon the hilt. The flat, glyphed blade.

The sheer presence was overwhelming. The choking terror had forced Perion’s third lung into operation as if he were struggling to breathe through a toxic atmosphere. As if he were drowning, drowning, drowning. Blackness touched the corners of his vision as he struggled upright, scrabbling for the hilt of his power sword.

Asterion Moloc ignored him.

“Bring this vessel to a halt and power down,” he spoke past the trembling Wayfinder Captain to the bridge crew. “At once.”

Perion could not find the voice to countermand the order. If he had, would the frightened mortals have obeyed their long-time leader?

It was irrelevant. Heads bent to consoles. The _Aniwa’s Ascendancy_ began to slow, her weapon batteries and loading stations powering down as orders raced from the voidship’s bridge. Void shields that were about to relight were cascaded down. Shells were removed from breeches.

Corpses of Terminator-armoured Wayfinders floated, dismembered, on the lowest of exposed decks.

Finally grasping his sword’s hilt, Captain Perion tore the blade from its sheath, power field igniting. It was a weak, flickering flame against the bleak emptiness of the Minotaurs Chapter Master. The giant’s armour canted away the fire, refused it, rejected it -- the bitter, burnished gold of his Terminator plate reflected only a faint light stripped of something integral.

Perion set his feet and raised the crossguard to his forehead in salute. Asterion Moloc remained still, a bronzed statue on the raised dais like something out of Terran mythology.

At the corner of his eye, Perion caught the gleam of moving black plate.

_Finally_.


	6. What The Thunder Said

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "And upside down in air were towers / tolling reminiscent bells, that kept the hours / And voices singing out of empty cisterns and exhausted wells.”

With a sub-space shockwave, the _Northern Chariot_ tore itself from the Warp. The journey had not been an easy one, even by the new standards set of travel. Entire decks had lost power and more than one supernatural breach had occurred. Enginarium stokers backed away from furnaces that screamed like burning men; rangefinders called for aid as their oculus equipment winked back at them.

On the bridge, Commodore Solon’s grav-chair whined complaints in ancient Ashaic. Its owner ignored it.

In the void before the strike cruiser, war was coming to a close. Renegade ship proudly displaying their broken allegiance for all to see were fleeing from the spitting guns of the _Daedelos Krata_, her voids savaged but intact, her escorts in eager pursuit to extract their toll of blood.

There was little need for positive identification, ship manifests or strategy. The renegade vessels had run for the Mandeville Point, right onto the guns of the _Northern Chariot_.

“Target and fire,” growled Solon as he struggled with his protesting throne.

“Rangefinders are still reporting anomalies in the targeting systems, Commodore,” protested the Master of Gunnery from her console. “We can not be precise.”

“No need for that. Just stop their retreat.”

“Aye, lord.”

Lance fire broke the tenuous cohesion of the enemy ships, their covering formation splintering. Waves of energy splashed over their ravaged shields in coruscating waves of purple light, the stress of even glancing hits from the powerful Imperial batteries exceeding tolerances. One cruiser sparked alight in a glittering display, internal fires venting outwards, reactor overloading.

The others managed a passable attempt at a breakthrough, their exhausted gunners still managing a scatter of shots that did not trouble the _Northern Chariot’s_ fully-ignited void shields. Solon had no mercy for the enemies of mankind and loathed traitors of all stripes. He was still appreciative of professional ability. There would be a toast to the renegade cruisers at High Table tonight, and tac-review on their gunnery run for drills in the coming weeks.

Bracketing fire from a pursuing vessel forced one cruiser into a crippling lance strike on her unshielded bridge. The result was not as remarkable as the eruption that heralded the previous death, though it was no less lethal -- without a Navigator or control, the cruiser could not make a Warp jump.

It powered on past the _Northern Chariot_, running lights winking out, heading into deep space.

The final renegade cruiser had no choice but to spike itself on a full Imperial broadside. Macro-cannons flung uncountable munitions into the sea-blue hull. Close-range missiles vapourised great chunks of the superstructure. More esoteric weapons, las-chargers and plasma-throwers, chewed up metal in astonishing quantities.

In the hierarchy of voidships, the Imperium of Man boasted some of the toughest, most stubborn vessels in the galaxy. Captains of nearly every xenos race in the galaxy had watched in helpless anger as the Emperor’s Navy stormed through ordinance that would have crippled anything else to deliver cleansing fire to His foes. The Imperium had ruled the stars for near ten-thousand years.

It did so with skill, faith, and sheer spite.

The dying cruiser’s own batteries continued to pummel the _Northern Chariot’s_ void shields even as explosions broke its spine, even as the shell-loaders burned. Dying gunners called out targeting data when their cogitators melted down, and the barrage died only when - at long, agonising last - the cruiser’s reactors went critical, cracking the ship in half.

Commodore Solon’s grav-chair went quiet. The bridge crew watched on pict-capture, oculus and through ports as their foe disintegrated.

The shipmaster coughed. “No immediate threats, Commodore. Hail from the fleet carrier: ident confirmed as _Daedelos Krata_ and escorts of the Adeptus Astartes, lord. Currently engaged in a boarding action on the battle-barge and requesting complement support. Details to follow.”

Immediately, the grav-chair’s armrest vox crackled to life.

“We’ll be prepped for Thunderhawk assault in three, Commodore.” Captain Geleit’s voice was shaded by lingering system fuzz from the recent Warp translation. “Get us close and save your armsmen: this is between us and the renegades.”

Solon did not reply. The grudges between Space Marines and their traitorous kin went beyond simple duty, simple hate. In the close quarters and cramped halls of a voidship, the fighting would be brutal beyond all belief. There was nothing that needed to be said.

* * *

It had been too long since the clash of ceramite and adamantium had rung through the _Northern Chariot’s_ embarkation deck. Drills were not enough to whet the fighting spirit of the Space Marines; the time spent in practice cages, in meditation, in weapons preparation rankled at them in the same way it did mortal soldiery.

They were weapons, born, bred, changed for war. Predators of the very apex: they stalked like caged beasts as they waited for the Thunderhawk assault ships to begin loading.

Captain Geleit revelled in it, despite his outward stoicism. He felt the thrill at every surge of a chainsword revving up, the owner performing a final motor check. His transhuman hearts swelled at the rough japes, the crash of armour against armour as his men jostled and clamoured, bragged and boasted.

He had deployed alongside the old warriors and new Primaris alike, and this was the truest difference between the breeds. Many Chapters deployed in order and silence, making of the order to war a monastic pilgrimage.

Their older brethren had fought this war for so long they had been irrevocably changed by it. No longer was it a matter of strength against strength, a contest of supremacy, the testing of sword and skill to determine who would rule the galaxy. For the enduring warriors of the Adeptus Astartes, there was no thought of the future beyond the battle at hand. There was only grim darkness ahead, only another war, and another, into infinity or death -- whichever came first.

As Geleit clapped pauldrons, exchanged words and moved through the press - even now forming into proper formation as the boarding signals began to light - the old thoughts resurfaced.

_Perhaps we are the true inheritors of the Imperium. Perhaps it is time for the old warriors to lay down their arms, satisfied that their duty was done._

The Lord Commander’s example was one to follow. Even Roboute Guilliman had been slowly replacing his closest companions, the Victrix Guard, with Primaris. Did this speak of a change to come? Was this a planned obsolescence, or would it come to a more direct confrontation between the future and the past?

Geleit came to a stop before his personal transport, his own Honour Guard arrayed before it. All ten were clad in the oversized Gravis Aggressor armour: fragstorm grenade launchers on their shoulders for clearing cramped quarters, the sinister black nozzles mounted on the back of their flame gauntlets. Geleit had hand-picked them to suit his own proclivities -- it was a rare situation indeed that he found himself not confronting his foes face-to-face, and boarding a renegade battle barge would be no exception.

One figure was entirely out of place, however.

Advisor Krokata stepped out of the Honour Guard’s shadow, his weathered features set in grim determination beneath a black hood. “I will be accompanying you, Captain.”

“Request denied,” replied Geleit without pause. “You shouldn’t even have access to this deck, Advisor. Best return to the strategium.”

“That was not a request. You do not know the Minotaurs as I do.” Krokata’s already grim countenance deepened, with something close to anger. “Are you familiar with their deployment pattern? Who holds their chain?”

Geleit waved a dismissal. “No, and I don’t care. They are brother Astartes, and we are going to their aid. Now is not the time for politics, Advisor.”

“You are wrong. Now is precisely the time for politics. I know the Chapter. I know…” Krokata looked away a moment, blinking. “I am familiar with Lord Asterion Moloc. Indeed, I believe I was set on this course for this very purpose. Words must pass between us.”

“You may speak to him at leisure once this action is concluded, Advisor, by vox. Stand aside.”

The fury of the gaze Krokata turned back on Geleit stunned him with its intensity. For a moment, there was something behind the wrinkles, the slack flesh, the jowls, the milky eyes. Something that flooded Geleit’s transhuman body with combat-stims, that bunched the sinew coils around his muscles, that stoked the Furnace in his primary heart.

A flash of lightning and gold. Blood pounded through Geleit’s body like an earthquake, like aftershocks, and the Advisor’s reply was the rumble of thunder.

“I will not. Asterion and I must speak.”

There was no arguing with the authority implicit in that voice. There was no time.

Geleit’s Thunderhawk had seen enough service during the Indomitus Crusade alongside mortal soldiers, commanders, dignitaries and priest. He had ordered two human-form seats installed in the primary bay, foam-couched and properly restrained. It was impossible for non-augmented humans to travel intact, let alone in comfort, in the gigantic crash-chairs and restraints that fit the Primaris Marines.

Ignoring the stares from his Honour Guard, Geleit gestured the Advisor up the ramp. Krokata bowed his head in thanks, and leaning heavily on his heartwood staff, made his way inside.

Geleit turned to the Aggressors. They had the good sense to be looking elsewhere.

“Not a word,” he growled.

* * *

_Blades revealed at last. A strike from an unheeded quarter. A shiver of power familiar._

Their leader stopped mid-stride beneath a strobing red lumen. The whirling light threw crimson across his black armour like spattered gore, though they had yet to meet any opposition. Similarly garbed in the water-patterned plate of the Wayfinders, his bodyguards halted as well, assuming defensive positions.

Bolters flicked warily to and from each flickering shadow. The _Aniwa’s Ascendancy’s_ lower decks had been gutted by plasma and biological weapons. Primary power systems had been annihilated along with the mortal crew who operated them. Corpses floated freely, gently bumping from wall to wall in a dread corsage.

The group had stopped checking each room as they passed. Nothing remained alive.

Even for warriors familiar with the terrible nature of the Ruinous Powers, the slaughter felt unclean - tainted somehow. The bodies they encountered were hard-suited against vacuum or chemical attack: they should have been preserved for a hundred years, coffins striped in the Wayfinder’s distinctive blue.

Behind each and every clear mask was a rotting visage, vacant eye-sockets leaking with pus and filth, all with a strange tinge of green. Every corpse was locked and bent in a rictus of agony. Death had not been swift or kind as it stalked the _Aniwa’s_ mortal crew.

No wonder the Minotaurs had not boarded. They had tripped and evaded a mortal snare.

“How did they know?” said Kor Maluk, leftmost of the bodyguard, the squad vox underscored by a hard buzzing. “If we had been closer, this would have been us. Grandfather does not discriminate.”

The decking itself had not escaped the ravages of plague and decay. Exposed piping vented noxious fumes and rust-crusted metal crumbled underfoot. Corruption shuddered and trembled behind the walls, bulging out like cysts ready to erupt.

“The Death Guard likely used similar tactics in their assault on the _Daedelos Krata_,” replied Toc Islin, sergeant’s bands around his wrists. “Once bitten, twice shy.”

“And the deployment of bio-weapons?”

Toc shrugged. “Better to spring the trap than wait for it to be closed on the hunter’s whim.”

Chaos was rarely patient. Whatever rituals had been conducted in the voidship’s depths, whatever sorcerous bindings, they had been triggered by the creeping death of toxic munitions whether by chance or design. Kor Maluk had not exaggerated the God of Decay’s penchant for the sharing of pestilent gifts - they had found no sign or trace of whoever had weakened the veil between Warp and reality. Likely they had been overtaken by the death they sought to unleash.

That meant little when dealing with Nurgle’s wizards and minions. The dead did not rest easily in Grandfather’s embrace.

“We should move on,” muttered Kor Maluk. “There are traps within traps here.”

Nothing moved for several seconds but the stately waltz of corpses and the sweep of bolter muzzles seeking targets. The truest strength of the Space Marines was not in the thickness of their plate or the might of their arms, but both married to their inhuman agility. Mobility was the greatest threat they possessed, that the Adeptus Astartes could bring their force to bear on any target, no matter how well hidden or protected.

Remaining still in the intersection of rotting hallways amidst a cloud of corpses was akin to fighting without a weapon. It plucked at the nerves of the bodyguard along with the supernatural dread of their surroundings.

Their leader’s contemplation finished, as though a voice only he could hear had trailed off.

“Thunderhawks inbound,” said Rasek Firespeaker. “The time has come.”


	7. The Waste Land

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I sat upon the shore / Fishing, with the arid plain behind me / shall I at least set my lands in order?”

Captain Geleit’s Thunderhawk held a central position amongst the four-craft speartip formation. He and his Honour Guard would not make the first landing: Geleit had learned much to his chagrin the ingenuity and deviousness of the Imperium’s foes, particularly when the opportunity to slay an officer presented itself. Making himself an easy target for the honour of primary assault would be an unforgivable dereliction of duty.

Rank came with far more responsibilities than privileges. Geleit looked away from the vid-screens describing the formation’s flight to glare at his passenger, the effect ruined by his helm.

The Advisor had shrunken into his crash-chair, gnarled staff gripped tightly in both hands. His eyes had closed and his cracked lips were moving rapidly, silently -- a prayer of some sort, no doubt. A good idea. Only the Emperor was likely to protect the venerable man from the ferocity of close-quarters combat with renegade Space Marines.

Even the ten upright Aggressors, held tight by docking claws that interfaced with their enormous Gravis armour, could only do so much to protect a mortal fool.

Geleit knew the old man’s fate should not be any concern of his. He knew many members of the Adeptus Astartes, Unnumbered Sons, fresh Primaris and veteran warriors alike who would have thrown Advisor Krokata out the airlock, or sent him hobbling through the target vessel alone.

It was because Geleit knew the attitude of his gene-cousins that he could not - would not - abandon Krokata to fate.

The Lord Commander expected better of all of them. The Primarch had awoken to an empire that had fallen beyond the realm of nightmare, that mirrored the darkness he had fought against during the Great Crusade. Roboute Guilliman had not simply wanted soldiers to enforce his will, fresh bodies for an eternity of war. He had ordered the creation of political creatures that would remind the Legiones Astartes of what they were fighting for.

If that meant playing escort while others ran to glorious battle, then so be it.

‘_Full manifests coming via the *Daedelos Krata_,’ the vox crackled in Geleit’s ear from a strategium redirect. He blink-clicked through several possible landing sites. “_Advise that the enemy cruiser *Hirothar_ is drifting, cannot challenge Thunderhawk assault.*”

Geleit turned his attention back to the vid-screens. The _Aniwa’s Ascendancy_ had been a beautiful vessel only recently. Her fluted length was free of the patchwork and pitted plates that often adorned the rough-and-ready battle barges of the Adeptus Astartes. Her flanks and breast were a vibrant dark blue, the shade of open, clear waters. Ornamental statues of eagles and Imperial Saints ran across her length unless ruined by the fuming scars of void shield failure cascades or weapons fire.

The optimal landing site was the launch hangers high up on her crest. According to the manifest data, plans and redesign tech-scrawl supplied by the Minotaurs, the berths were mostly ceremonial but provided an almost direct line to reinforce the bridge. Under the Minotaurs’ control, the blast shields protecting the hangers had been lowered and atmosphere restored.

‘Confirm C-AX as primary landing,’ Geleit said over the Company vox. A chorus of assent followed immediately from squad leaders and lieutenants ‘Sweep and clear through assigned points. Regroup at bridge terminus and we’ll work with the Minotaurs from there.’

The leading Thunderhawk broke off to begin its boarding run. The two remaining drew closer to Geleit’s own ship, slightly ahead, as they held to combat readiness.

Again the strategium vox crackled in Geleit’s ear. Annoyed, he snapped a cut-off signal. The static persisted - a channel outside the band, worming its way into their communications network. Geleit’s helm called up a visual representation of technological barriers being bypassed by correct if dated, Imperial cyphers and codes.

‘-peat, Asterion Moloc has left the bridge. To the commander, repeat, Asterion Moloc is no longer-’ spoke a voice through the haze.

‘Identify yourself,’ demanded Geleit. ‘I won’t listen to a vox ghost.’

Silence for a moment, then a series of clicks and the static faded to almost nothing. ‘Captain Geleit? We’re loyalists, sir, just escaped from when the Chapter went mad. Been able to monitor but not receive comms until you got close. Prep for idents and position.’

Another wave of data sieved through Geleit’s helm feed. The machine-spirit was beginning to protest with the faint vibrating of the pict-displays. It rarely handled such volumes and such varieties of material unrelated to war and was making its displeasure known. Geleit muttered a soothing tech-psalm as he parsed the incoming credentials.

A new landing site had appeared in the tactical overlay, a pressurised vein running from a small maintenance skiff berth into the _Ascendancy’s_ armoured heart. The projected path was like an artery pressed against the battle barge’s skin, where it had been broken and cratered by the Minotaurs in their void ambush.

Once again, Geleit glanced at Krokata. The Advisor had drawn into himself as though terrified - no, Geleit blinked and looked again, without the transhuman prejudice against lesser men.

Not frightened. Krokata was preparing himself for a confrontation as surely as if he had been attended by an arming servitor.

Which left only the question of what to do.

Duty alone required that Geleit deny the voice as a trick, as an enemy ploy designed to draw him away from protection. The cyphers were old, but were they from before the Wayfinders had turned? It was impossible to say. The idea seemed genuine, particularly in their desire to link up with the Minotaurs Chapter Master -- there was always strength in numbers on a hostile vessel.

If it was an assassination attempt, they would not have spoken - they would have moved against Asterion Moloc without giving away their intent or position. And Geleit pushed away the idea that he was a personal target: the Wayfinders had no way of knowing or preparing for his arrival.

Duty was one thing. Obedience. Surrendering to the musty books and bent dictates that had turned the Imperium into the wasted land of today. That was where unthinking, unquestioning actions led.

Geleit was Primaris, an Unnumbered Son of the Primarchs, and better was expected of him than blind duty.

‘Wayfinder loyalists - hold the berth, we’re coming to you,’ Geleit said, then flicked back to the Company vox net. ‘Advise Second and Third: stay true to initial objectives. We’re moving to respond _vis_ secondaries. Keep me updated on your push, brothers - no mercy for the renegades.’

Freed of their obligations, the two remaining Thunderhawks banked away to a new landing pattern on the upper decks. Geleit’s own vessel swooped down instead, beneath the statues and spars, through one of the gaping breaches in the _Ascendancy’s_ hull.

Banking and turning, flitting through the debris - spinning chunks of metal, the venting of sad corpses into the near-vacuum - Geleit’s Thunderhawk navigated towards the loyalist landing point. The only light was the vessel’s own guide-lights and the occasional soundless secondary explosion or swiftly-extinguished fire. Tension crawled along superhuman spines. The Aggressors shifted in their boarding clamps.

At length, an undamaged portal presented itself. A docking gate just large enough to allow the Thunderhawk to slip inside, to rest in the lee of a maintenance skiff.

As the craft settled to the unmarked deck, the hanger doors rumbled closed. This section of the _Ascendancy_ was still supplied with power. Tocsins hooted, warning lights flashed as the chamber repressurised and breathable atmosphere cycled in from the great steel ducts.

Space Marines in power armour could operate in vacuum conditions -- could fight on a starship’s hull, even, mag-locked, their suits and specialised third lungs converting all the breathable chemicals required.

Krokata, frail and human, would choke and die immediately.

Geleit waited until the pilot reported that the hanger’s atmosphere was suitable for base humanity before lowering the assault ramp. The clamps holding the Aggressors in place disengaged and they stormed from the Thunderhawk like warrior bees from a kicked hive, grenades cycling up into their fragstorm launchers and hungry fire licking from their flame gauntlets.

There was no wince as Krokata unbuckled his harness and stood. The Advisor looked different, somehow. Energised by purpose. With a nod to Geleit, they descended the ramp together into the protective cluster of ceramite.

Geleit surveyed the humble berth. There was none of the corruption he had expected to see on a renegade vessel: no angry scrawl, no eight-pointed stars, no blood and worse on the walls. If anything, the maintenance areas of the _Ascendancy_ were better-kept than some of the serf quarters on the _Northern Chariot_.

It unsettled the Captain to see such pristine conditions aboard an Archenemy vessel. A careless gauntlet went to the hilt of his power sword as if to draw it and rain destruction on the decking itself, to scar it so its appearance conformed with his prejudices.

That was the truest power of the foe. To appear so alike to those still loyal.

As if summoned by that dark thought, the supposed Wayfinders stepped from the skiff’s shadow.

* * *

They were three only, the sea-blue of their armour scorched and blackened by flame and cratered by impact and mass-reactives. There was nothing of war-weariness or torture about them: their leader walked forward with helm-lenses fixed on Geleit and his Honour Guard, trusting his flanks completely to the two with him.

The right bore sergeant’s bands and red sigils on his gauntlets; some Chapter marking Geleit could not discern. A simple bolter was mag-locked to his thigh, a brace of grenades around his waist. The left bore the most battle damage, particularly the tell-tale burns of las-fire. One of his Lightning Claws had been shorn cleanly away, leaving his left gauntlet only with the retracted talons.

Most singular was their leader: he stepped with a grace hard to emulate in power armour, never committing himself to a step before achieving a perfect balance. Two scabbards hung at his shagreen belt, the sword-hilts wrapped in black cloth. His armour was similarly ornate, the ocean’s blue tempered with mossy green.

The two parties faced each other at a short distance. Enough for polite conversation; enough to reach the other in the blink of an eye should hostilities commence.

Breaking the standoff, the Wayfinders leader clashed a gauntlet against his chest plate: an old Imperial greeting. ‘Thank you for your trust, Captain Geleit. We have little time to spend on pleasantries. I trust you agree with the planned route?’

‘It’s your ship, Wayfinder,’ Geleit replied. ‘You lead, we follow. Linking with Moloc and coordinating a retake are priority one.’

The leader nodded. ‘Of course. The traitors will be cleansed.’

Geleit switched to internal vox, gesturing as he did so, picking out five of the Honour Guard to secure the berth itself and their line of retreat as necessary. And, with a sudden pang of realisation, he recalled the battle-wounds of the Wayfinders loyalists.

‘Are your men fit for combat?’ Geleit asked, tone soft. ‘I understand wanting to take back your ship, but it’ll do you no good to die before you see justice done.’

The leader laughed, a pleasant, rolling chuckle. ‘Fear not for Toc Islin’ -he gestured to his right- ‘and Kor Maluk’ -again, to his left- ‘no orders I can give will keep them from the throats of traitors and heretics.’

‘No orders? Did you hold rank here? Apologies, cousin, I saw no markings on your plate.’

‘I held some small position in the warrior-lodges, Captain. I am Rasek, titled Firespeaker for my rousing sermons.’ Another self-deprecating chuckle. ‘Rousing my brothers to tears and boredom, no doubt, judging by the beatings they would administer in the practice cages soon after.’

Geleit’s heart went out to the loyal Wayfinders at that moment. They were a proud Chapter, brought low by treachery and deceit -- there were wounds behind their easy speech that would never heal. Some of the brothers Rasek spoke of so fondly would, no doubt, have turned on him at the moment of betrayal. Geleit wished then, with all his faith, never to have to endure the heartbreak of facing men he had known and fought with as enemies of the Imperium.

Without thinking, Geleit stepped across the distance separating the two groups. Lightning claws sparked to life; Aggressor grenade-pods fast-loaded in readiness.

He extended his gauntlet to Rasek. ‘We’re well met, Firespeaker.’

Without hesitation the Wayfinder chaplain took the gesture, and they locked wrist-to-wrist in the formal warrior’s greeting of the Adeptus Astartes.

‘We’re well met indeed, Captain.’

For a moment they stood there, as close as an embrace, before Krokata broke the moment with a wheezing cough. Every eye was suddenly on the wizened human, looking so dreadfully out of place among this meeting of armoured giants.

‘I’m sorry,’ Krokata said, wiping his mouth with the back of one hand. ‘Did I miss something?’

* * *

Turn your eyes away from the meeting below to the labyrinth above. Let Rasek and Geleit enjoy their all-too-brief camaraderie. Let them journey through the _Ascendancy_ unobserved.

Let Krokata’s lack of previously perpetual limp worry them not. Let them ignore the Advisor’s staff -- the tap of metal on metal -- as they go, distracted as they are. Let them ignore the eyes beneath that black hood, the golden touch of them, the muttered words -- they are no more than an old man’s affectations, after all.

Let them go at their leisure. We have time.

We are too late, O storied friends, too late by far.

How long? By years? Centuries, perhaps? Ah, the Maledictum makes time weak and soft and easily bent, and what would it matter even if the line ran straight? We are too late. We have wiped the pane clear, and the sight is not at all pleasing to us. No, not at all. Better to have never known. We could imagine a different ending, a happier one, and been satisfied.

But that is not our way, is it? We must know, even if the knowing destroys us, destroys the story. Our observation deforms the universe. We demand the narrative’s conclusion, as sickening as it may be. The cruelty of the audience is unfathomable, unconscionable -- unavoidable.

* * *

Nothing challenged Asterion Moloc as he walked alone through the _Aniwa’s Ascendancy_.

Nothing could.

The Black Spear still ran with unnatural ichor, the animating fluid of Perion Kallaz, Second Captain of the Wayfinders Chapter, Shipmaster and Traitor. It mingled with the more understandable properties of Astartes blood: the half-dozen Black Legion gene-mod assassins who had broken camouflage at the critical moment, at the perfect juncture.

It had been no challenge. No mark lay upon his Tartaros plate, the venerable armour hand-crafted by the Emperor’s finest artificers. Perhaps even blessed by His touch in the final days of the Crusade, when every strength was needed for the final victory.

His touch.

Does Asterion’s hand tighten on the Spear’s dark haft for a moment, or is that a trick of the light? Surely it must be.

Boots ring on the decking like the great tolling of some cracked, bronze bell.

Asterion Moloc walked through the heart of the Wayfinders, their seafaring soul. Campaign banners and honours hung proudly on walls, cyber-cherubs nesting in the vaulted darkness of the ceiling waiting for the command to trumpet a record of the Chapter’s triumphs.

Great wooden vessels from the Chapter’s home planet take pride of place in great stasis fields, their polished hulls and oars new as if they had just slipped from the shipwright’s hands. A heritage of war. Uncountable lifetimes of it. From the heights of the Dark Age where men had flung K-fields and quantum effects at each other across the gulf of space. From the descent of Strife, where primitives slew each other with stones in the wreckage of silver cities. To the hesitant steps back up the rungs of civilisation’s ladder.

This was the heart of humanity. The struggle. The praxis. The contest between two opposing forces, the inevitable convergence of powers. The crashing of borders. The grappling of markets. The battle of ideas. Right and wrong had no meaning there, not upon the scales of survival.

All things came to conflict. The only measure of worth was in their courage, their determination, their brazen desire to live on. To spit in the eye of the hostile universe itself, to grab life by the throat and say, ‘I am still here.’

Asterion Moloc’s grip was unshakable.

Oh, he had been wounded grievously, that much was true. He had not won every battle. Beneath the Terminator armour was a body sorely tested by eternal war, scarred and stitched, fused with bionics and arcane devices in place of several vital organs.

To a Space Marine, defeat was unthinkable, a source of tremendous shame.

Lord Asterion Moloc thought little of it. History was one great line of defeats, each greater than the last. Empires rose and fell and rose again. As the Imperium dragged itself out of the ashes, out of each successive Heresy, each Apostasy, each Interregnum, so too did Asterion rise again, repair his armour and set his spear.

The Imperium’s fascination with death disgusted him. The meek acceptance of it. The martyr-seeking priests and all their ilk, all their prayers and preaching about sacrifice. The Chaplains of the Adeptus Astartes yelling of courage and honour.

Courage and honour.

Courage and honour.

Do we see Asterion flinch again as if some raw pain were delivered to him unseen? Some fire that chars his heart, his mind, his soul? Surely not. Surely another trick of the light. Surely we are mistaken.

We have come to the termination. The time for introspection, for now, has passed.

On walked Asterion Moloc, boots falling to the rhythm of a barely-heard bell. The lumens swing above him, casting their crazed light to and fro. Here there are eight-pointed stars scratched into metal, daubed with blood and worse. His passage is not impeded by the corpses of Marines in blue plate, Wayfinders with bloody, pus-encrusted wounds where their progenoid glands once were.

He has reached the Apothecarium. This section of the ship retains full power, internally run, and will continue to run, for many years. There is nothing more precious to a Chapter than this. Nothing more worthy of protection.

No guardian is visible. No great monster. No plague-beast. No kill-team. No squad of Black Legion elite. No spawn of Chaos. No bile-spewing sorcerer.

There is only a wizened figure, tall for a human, leaning heavily on a heartwood staff as though exhausted. His head is bowed - in tiredness, in prayer, in pain, we cannot say - and he does not look up until Asterion slams the butt of the Black Spear onto the deck. The Lord of the Minotaurs can see his prize within reach. His patience with the theatrics of the Archenemy has been wholly exhausted. He will see this ended, now.

The man lowered his hood with one hand. The eyes within that wrinkled face are fierce and gold, haunted with sorrow.

And Lord Asterion Moloc, Chapter Master of the Minotaurs, the Bringer of Wrath, Spear of Judgement feels dismay as recognition dawns.


	8. Armageddon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls.”

‘No,’ breathes Asterion Moloc, the vox doing nothing to flatten his shock. ‘Not this.’

Suspend your disbelief a moment at this scene. One of the Imperium’s finest warriors, a gene-forged monster of uncountable years who has slaughtered under the light of half the universe’s stars, held at bay by an ancient human.

Krokata is tall for his species, good health and breeding from the Throneworld, but he would barely reach the Chapter Master’s upper chest even outside the hulking Terminator armour.

He is an insect glaring defiantly at the descending boot. He is nothing.

‘I’ve sent others on, Asterion,’ Krokata said. ‘Soon their work will be done, but until it is, I cannot let you pass.’

The Chapter Master half-raised his spear, fraught. ‘Damn you, Cuvea. You are free of Terra and the Throne. We both are. Do not let them use you like this.’

‘A Custodian with a conscience?’ replied Krokata with a sad smile. ‘How novel. They shall add that to the weft of rumours that surround you, Asterion. A true cyborg, a personality engram, a Primaris testbed -- what will they come up with next?’

‘This is not the time for your japes.’

Krokata sighed, running a hand through long, thinning grey hair. ‘Is it not? Asterion, you and I could go away from this place. We could return to the _Daedelos_, find a regicide board, breach a cask of your O’hulis wine and continue on to Terra in good company.’

‘No.’ Asterion’s reply was firm and final and wracked with need. ‘I cannot. They need this. My-’

The Chapter Master faltered, the words dying unsaid in his gorget. A wraith-pain gnawed at his skull, thrumming through meat and bone. A blinding vision of high walls and vibrant colours. Vital reds upon grains of washed-out yellow. The agony he can bear without complaint: it is a borrowed thing, a shade of torment borrowed from another. A reminder. A warning.

It is the root belief behind that pain that is unbearable. The sin of admittance. If the universe knows something is precious to you, it will do all it can to destroy it. This is life’s most painful lesson, the most bitter curse.

‘Brothers?’ Krokata finished for him. ‘Kin? Yes, Asterion, I know what you do with the gene-seed for your Minotaurs. I know why the records are so tightly sealed. I know why you would plunder a cache from an entirely incompatible lineage. So does the Archenemy. Think, Asterion! Why would the Death Guard go to such lengths to strike at your Chapter’s heart? Do you trust this stroke of providence that put the Wayfinders so easily into your path? They _know_! And they want you, Asterion! They want you with all the greed of their kind!’

The outpouring of passion to fill the void Asterion had left surprised them both. Passion heated Krokata’s blood, flushed his cheeks, bore the lines away from around his eyes. For a moment - just a moment - he seemed taller, straighter, ennobled.

Krokata shook his head, taking the Minotaur’s silence for acceptance. ‘I will not let them force this dark choice, Asterion. I will take it from you.’

It was too much. Too much by far. The golden light that flickers just behind Krokata’s eyes. The roaring visions of red sands. The dying of brothers, their salvation - their _freedom_ \- mere steps away. The choice taken from him. Asterion Moloc would not see the sins of the past repeated. He would live, damn them all! He would live, and with his life, grant others the freedom to live as well. On their own merits, their own worth, their own choices.

Not by the whim of tyrants. Not by the imperious decisions of another golden-eyed man.

Faster than quicksilver the Black Spear came up, swung like a brutal halberd with all the force of gene-forged muscles and Martian science behind. A blow that would have sheared through adamantite had it struck true.

It did not. The great blade glanced from the Advisor’s heartwood staff, Krokata swiftly moving out of the Minotaur’s striking range. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘So it comes to this after all.’

‘Flee,’ growled Asterion, settling his weapon to attack again. ‘Or die, Cuvea.’

‘I shed that name in the Hall of Armaments along with all the others. It is Krokata alone, now.’

The battle-fury was upon them both. Each subtle shift of balance, each circling movement, the searching out of defences and avenues of attack. In their minds, the oncoming duel played out a thousand times. The truth of all things had proven itself once more. Words were never enough. Only those who could enforce them with steel deserved the right to speak.

High-riders are we all.

Imagine the strength of will it took for Asterion to offer one last opportunity. ‘You cannot stop me. You will die in the attempt. I cannot hold back from this. Please, Krokata - for all that is between us - stand aside.’

The Advisor’s sigh was the only answer as he passed one veined, wrinkled hand over his face.

The bent spine straightens, now regal and proud and near the Chapter Master in stature. Hair so blonde it could be spun gold from the finest loom falls over broad, black-robed shoulders. All the signs of age and weariness fade away: skin tautens, lesions vanish, cataracts withdraw.

Krokata stamps the heel of his heartwood staff onto the Apothecarium floor - it rings of metal on metal, and the illusion falls away to reveal the beautiful lines of a Guardian Spear, the gene-coded weapons born in personal defence of the Emperor of Mankind. The twin-linked bolter under its blade bears not only the crossed thunderbolts of long-lost Unity but the ancient sigul of the secretive Terrawatt clan.

‘The eyes of the Emperor are upon you, Asterion,’ The Advisor’s voice took on the richest of timbres, an orators tone, a playwright, a herald. ‘Make my death mean something.’

The surrender. The sacrifice.

The rage boiled up in Asterion Moloc in a vast, endless ocean. Rage and sorrow, for tears touched his eyes, hidden beneath that brazen helm. The Emperor -- the distant corpse, the skeleton on the painted throne -- did not _deserve_ the unflinching loyalty of men like Krokata. Asterion had served well and faithfully punishing oathbreakers and renegades, slaying hostile xenos, for he believed with all his heart in the protection of humanity and the bonds of brotherhood.

But he had never done so blindly. He had accepted the Throne’s tyranny. The Emperor’s malign influence on so many lives, all so ready to give of themselves -- as if they yearned for it, _needed_ to perish to prove their faith. An empire that longed to die rather than live.

What kind of man could follow that? Fight for it, bleed for it? Clamp the chain and collar around their own neck, and declare themselves satisfied and secure?

A man who could see through the insanity and nihilism to that grimy, distant star named ‘hope’.

A man who could still dream of unity.

We turn away, O storied friends, out of shame. We are not worthy to witness the opening blows. Leave them to make their accusations with spear and bolt. The golden flurry of abandonment. The black arc of duty. They clash unheeded. For now. For now.

* * *

Captain Geleit and Rasek Firespeaker emerged together into a vast, domed vault, the secondary and outlying repositories of the Wayfinders Apothecarium. Research implements lay discarded on sterile examination slabs, weighing down flickering data-slates. The air was shockingly clean for all the filth they had passed through, helm reports on toxins a dull green: none present.

This was the heart of every Chapter. Not the battle-halls with their finery, not the honour rolls, not even the Marines themselves. They were all just frippery in comparison to the sacred chambers of propagation.

As long as their Apothecarium survived, the Chapter could be reborn from endless defeats, rising again and again like a phoenix.

Through the mystic arts of the Mechanicus, through the ancient wisdom of the Emperor, the Adeptus Astartes became a self-propagating force. How many foes across the galaxy had thought the threat of Imperial hegemony ended? How many times had a Chapter faded into myth, mere bogeymen generations on, only to emerge once again at full, terrifying strength?

Blank vid-screens and pict-captures from specimen chambers stared at Geleit as he and Rasek picked their way through the clean carnage.

Everything was so thoroughly scrubbed down, so efficiently cleaned -- so white, so unreal. Like bone. As if the pair were climbing through the empty sockets of some vast, bleached skull, stripped by some carrion-eating beast.

Geleit’s hackles rose in preparation for combat, though no target presented itself. Rasek laid a steadying hand on his pauldron, and tapped the side of his helm, at the temple.

‘You feel it, yes?’ the Wayfinder asked. ‘The hunger? There were bodies here, recently, and it took them. Nothing has been wasted. It is as efficient as it is hateful.’

Geleit nodded. ‘Don’t need to be a Librarian to know the Archenemy’s spoor, aye. Do you know…?’

The question hung between them, swaying on the gallows of untested friendship. It was a mask for the truer one: _did_ you know? Did you suspect what your brothers had done, were doing, in your most sacred places?

Rasek shook his head. ‘I no more guessed the mind of our leaders than you could hear the thoughts of Guilliman. I had no cause to visit this place. All I know is that this is where we will find the true purpose of Chaos on this ship. Your Advisor knew this, too.’

Both warriors held for a moment, as if they might catch words spoken from afar, even the dreaded sound of violence. But well-sealed bulkheads stood between them and where Krokata had planted his feet to welcome the Chapter Master of the Minotaurs. He had bid them hurry with that sad, parting smile.

Haste was something Geleit understood well. The Indomitus Crusade had been a breakneck endeavour by Imperial standards. Questions left unanswered. Orders unquestioned.

But he was no stranger to suspicion, either -- and not so naive to voice it. The way his companion said ‘this ship’ rather than ‘our ship’. The passing familiarity displayed two who could never have met. There was nothing of the seafarer’s rolling walk in Rasek, no sensibilities of the vast world-oceans. Indeed, he was a man of great dryness, scorched and blistered, jealous of every drop of blood. A desert-worlder. Geleit had served with Salamanders and the lauded soldiers of Tallarn -- he knew what to look for.

There would be a reckoning to come. For now, their purposes aligned, and that was enough.

Idly, Geleit swept a gauntlet over a nearby dataslate. The information coursed through haptic links, up along the still-function noosphere into his helm’s suite. He blink-clicked through specimen picts, Apothecary reports and saw the pattern of plagued descent at once.

‘Mixing Astartes cells with…’ Geleit muttered, half-focused on what he read. ‘Inducing a supernatural event via Warp inhabitation… severe side effects… methodologies for the stabilisation of bio-informative bridges… this is a carnival of horrors, Rasek. I have entry codes for the primary chamber.’

The Wayfinder’s response was clipped and grim. ‘We know what to expect, then.’

‘We do. Prepare yourself.’

There were six secondary chambers in all, situated in a self-contained ring wrapped tight around the central Apothecarium. Each served one purpose or another -- the treatment of Marine physiology, the implantation or extraction of organs, the survey-and-stasis apartments where the Chapter’s newest members slept and healed from their transformation.

The seventh was the most important and most secure, only accessible with a specific combination held by the highest-ranking officers of the Chapter. Within were held, in absolutely controlled temperatures, the vital gene-seed, ready for a new generation of heroes.

Geleit punched the code-sequences into a lock-pad on the vault door. Rasek stood at his shoulder, one gauntlet resting lightly on sword-hilt.

Great clamps of nigh-unbreakable metal withdrew from their runners. Environmental seals peeled away in their dozens. Fibre bundles sparked and spun as they hauled on their burdens. Plates of adamantite groaned as they were pulled away. There were few fortresses in the Imperium who could boast of thicker walls, tighter locks than what resided at the heart of each and every Apothecarium.

Fitting that new warriors were born into a citadel. All the better to prepare them for a life of unending war.

Plague-fouled air licked out of widening cracks, rolling over the Marines like a lover’s questing lips. Geleit gagged even through the scrubbers and filters of his helm: this was not a mortal affliction, but a supernatural one. No mortal device could lessen it.

Geleit tried to force himself into the chamber, to even raise his head to see. He could not.

The vile embrace crushed his larynx, lolled his neck, pushed his consciousness out of his body. He could feel the breaking of bonds between his body and soul, his very essence drawn into the chamber while his body remained still.

And then, all of a sudden, he was free. Life thundered through him once more. Geleit gasped a wracked, wheezing breath. And witnessed.

Rasek had drawn his blade at last.

As they had fought through the _Aniwa’s Ascendancy_, Geleit’s companion had not once put a hand to his twin swords. Not even when they were ambushed by a Wayfinders squad. The loyalist had simply picked up a fallen bolt pistol and set to work putting mass-reactive through helms.

Geleit had feared, somewhat, when he had ordered his Aggressors into the side-tunnels to support Rasek’s own bodyguards -- securing, they had said, transportation. One of the Minotaur’s Storm Eagles for a quick extraction.

Not that Geleit had any qualms about his own swordsmanship. He simply wondered if the loyalist had lost all heart for fighting his brothers.

He now understood why. A weapon retains its greatest power when an enemy cannot prepare for it.

Ionized sparks drooled from the scimitar’s sheath. A hazy nimbus of frost-blue power swam around the blade itself, generating from the beautifully carved runes. The meaning was lost on Geleit - the language long-dead - but the pictograms were clear enough. Glaciers. Meltwater. Ice, drowning and death.

Geleit had no way of knowing the script of Colchis-That-Was. There were still, in this grim place, small mercies.

He shook his head to clear the lingering distemper, drawing his own power sword. ‘My thanks, Firespeaker.’

‘My pleasure,’ replied Rasek, as the two entered the final chamber together. ‘Ware the daemon. We reach the heart of this matter.’

The chamber was entirely hollow. All trace of previous purpose had been stripped from the flooring. More so now did it resemble a scooped skull, the organs extracted and interred, prepared for mummification.

Set into the walls -- every wall -- were the flat, planed surface of temperature-controlled glass. Each pane fronted a recessed vault. And within each vault, ordered rows of metal canisters, each containing preservative fluid and the matured progenoid organs sealed inside. A Chapter’s future in chrome, held by the Archenemy. There could be no greater blasphemy.

Atop a raised dais it reclined on the sole anatomical slab as though the bare stone were a gilded throne in a palace of excess.

Unlike others of its kind who tended towards obesity and sloth, the servant of Nurgle was whisper-thin, all long bones and thin that would yield at the slightest pressure. It resembled a humanoid female in some way, though the bared chest was so shrunken and starved as to have no discernible feature, and the cleft between its stick-thin legs drew up into the pelvis without any evidence of gender.

It leaned forward, the broad face frowning, the dark pits of its eyes firing with disappointment.

**’You are not the bull come to bargain,’** it hissed. **’He is close. Bring him to me, and you will be rewarded with Grandfather’s boon.’**

It looked askance for a moment at Raske, before it's cracked lips split into a wide grin. **’Not that, I think, you would accept. Your indecision will be your death, Firespeaker. It is ordained.’**

Geleit shot his companion a glance. There was a difference of posture in Rasek, now. Before he had seemed… cramped, held in. Now, he was a picture of ease and repose, sword in hand with a daemon to slay. The doubts Geleit had harboured about the Wayfinder began to fade. No servant of the Archenemy would stand against a being like this. It would not be allowed.

Would it?

‘Are we speaking of names now?’ Rasek asked, beginning to circle the dais. Geleit took the opposite direction so that the daemon had to twist and turn to keep its sunken eyes on them both. ‘Shall I name you as well, you of mark and little, famine and price? You of torn cloth and fouled manna? The shrieker of the Babbling Tower?’

Geleit saw -- he _saw_ \-- the terror that froze the daemon into stillness. **’Stop!’** it commanded, one hand raised to ward off the words. **’You will not! Not so close to the gene-seed! Not before the Minotaur can make his choice! Not even your lord would dare this slight against Nurgle!’**

‘You know nothing of what he _dares_, daemon,’ Rasek replied, and with a flourish drew his second blade, the black of gangrene to the first’s frost. ‘Geleit! With me!’

Questions unanswered. Such was the way of things. There would always be time, later.

Geleit thought no more on the daemon’s words as he and Rasek struck as one.

* * *

The crash of weapons spun back and forth through the Apothecarium’s entrance, the echoes of war meeting themselves and doing recursive battle as Asterion Moloc drove the Custodian back, step by red step.

Blood ran from innumerable wounds on Krokata’s battered body, through cracks in the golden carapace beneath his black robes, through the mesh of his undercoat. Chips of cleaved armour marked the Custodian’s retreat from the grand entrance with its heaped corpses, the tiny sparks of light crushed to darkness under Asterion’s bronze boots.

Krokata had never been pushed harder in his centuries of service to the Throne. Not against the Champions of the Adeptus Astartes. Not against his fellow Ephoroi. Not even against the very flesh and blood of the Archenemy, the daemons of Chaos.

His arms shivered with pain and exhaustion as he swept his guardian weapon around in a blinding flourish to deflect another relentless thrust from the Minotaur.

The strength behind the Black Spear was impossible to fully divert. All Krokata could do now was delay, parry, and catch the blows where they would least impact his ability to remain a convincing threat. The spear-blade tore through the meat of the Custodian’s shoulder in a spray of blood and armour-circuitry and Krokata staggered away, trying to make space where there was none.

_I am not dead yet,_ his thoughts ran. _I am not dead yet._

And was this not a triumph for the one who had been named on his golden ascent as the ‘little owl’? From the very start, he had been marked for the Ephoroi. While his shield-brothers gained the names of Old Earth’s kings and legends, Krokata had always been the runt.

The runt. The little one. Krokata knew enough biological theory to understand the selfishness of genes. When there was not enough food to go around -- and what did the Custodes feast on but glory? -- perhaps it was best for the runt to pass on. There was always a need for agents outside the Throneworld.

Outside the nest. An ignoble shove. Make room, make room!

For most who find themselves falling, there is often an acceptance of gravity, of velocity most terminal. A moment of understanding. An unburdening. Forces outside their control.

And a few -- a very rare few -- learn how to fly.

Krokata still held Asterion Moloc back from his goal. There was nothing to appeal to behind that helm now. The battle-rage had taken the warrior completely, and the Minotaur’s furious blows were delivered in utter silence with tireless, indefatigable strength. It had not wavered a moment from their first clash of weapons.

But the Custodian held. He recovered, leaping nimbly over the scything spear-tip, striking back with a combination of his own.

It was a futile gesture. There was no gap in Asterion’s defence, not between the storm-shield and Black Spear. Even the Custodian’s guardian weapon had no surety of penetrating the Tartaros armour, for the coruscating power field around the blade had died minutes -- Emperor on Terra, _minutes!_ \-- since, the generator shorn away in a hasty block.

Every moment counted. Every moment. Every second.

Krokata lives on, and as he finishes his martial movement and sees that he has gained himself a few steps forward, he exults. His pride is not in himself -- though he has every right to be, for he has done a thing even infamous Valdor would smile at -- but in the One who sits the Throne. In the dark places of Krokata’s mind, he has wondered. He has even doubted.

Now all is right in his world. All things have a purpose. Even runts such as he.

Let him have this moment.

* * *

In the pale light of the Apothecarium, the task neared completion.

They fought like dervishes, like brothers who had known the other’s side for a hundred years or more. When the daemon struck at one, the other’s blade bit into that hoarse and leathery flesh, spilling ichor as deep black and abhorrent as death-ink. When it’s wide arms - so wide an embrace, so distended the jaws - sought one, whether blue-clad Wayfinder or unpainted Son, the other would step in to hew at those limbs, cracking the bone, spreading the bruise.

Geleit was dimly aware of his companion’s chanting. _El-Shalem_ was the call, and it rose and fell like waves on a seawall. It was a name, or a title, or a signifier, and against it the daemon could do nothing but howl, to try and blot the words away.

The chant rose like water, cool and dark and with a hunger that eclipsed that the Captain had felt as they had first come to this place. Swallowed it, and made it as nothing.

‘Rasek!’ Geleit cried, spinning his blade in an elaborate pattern to force the daemon to stop screaming and defend itself. ‘What in the Emperor’s name are you doing!’

The daemon answered for the Wayfinder. **’Anathema!’** it bellowed, the fire in its eyes sputtering and crazed. **’Anathema! He is anathema! Man of the Imperium, turn your sword on him! He will doom us all!’**

Even had Geleit wanted to, there could have been no betrayal.

Rasek’s scimitars blurred, faster than transhuman vision could register, their afterimages a silent span of death. They seemed to part the air, the skin of reality itself with their black-and-blue rhythm. They sang as they struck, over and over, and their song was a dirge, a funeral, a calling of black curtains.

The wounds they dealt upon the daemon were not the expected, not savage rents and jagged, oozing holes such as Geleit’s own weapon delivered.

They cut at an angle that lay flush to the physical. They stole away the daemon’s flesh and bone, excising it from the material plane as cleanly and surely as a scalpel worked upon diseased tissue.

Geleit saw it. He saw. In the dance, a break. He seized it.

Confounded by its antithesis, the daemon had given its blind side to the Primaris Captain. Geleit swept in under a too-late flailing of one long, cracked limb and thrust with all his strength into the daemon’s bowels.

His sword exploded, the material properties unable to withstand the entirely alien physiology of a being of Greater Chaos. But it was enough. The jagged shards had torn open a wound through which spilt all manner of thing: limbs still bearing Astra Militarum fatigue-dress, a gold-chased Admiral’s cap, a stuttering bionic eye.

The daemon clasped at its side, a desperate attempt to stop the outflow of consumption. An eater of worlds with a slit stomach. How pathetic the sight.

Rasek met no opposition as his scimitars lashed out, the matter-thieves stealing away the daemon’s head.

Every pane and canister in the Apothecarium broke at once, the essence that had been kept aside for the Minotaur’s choice expanding, screaming, a river of corruption that struggled to return to its master, to heal the mortal wound. None reached the corpse; each dark streamer fading into the ether full meters before the platform.

The final remains of the daemon withered away before their eyes, into dust, ash, and then - blown on a wind from beyond - nothing remained.

The death blow.

* * *

The death blow.

It had already lasted beyond all consideration, all expectation. It should never have been like this, in so many ways. Krokata fought beyond all the templates that had been laid out for him upon creation, as the gene-scientists forged his body and mind to fit the needs of the Ten Thousand. So few survive the process. So few survive the trials. So few earn even their first name.

And yet, here is Krokata, who was once Cuvea (and a hundred more appellations, carved into the undersized golden armour still nestled in a shadowed crook of the Hall of Armaments).

Remember him, now, at this moment, as he brings his spear up to catch Asterion’s sweep.

This is the end, O storied friends. This is the end.

The Black Spear struck the guardian weapon at just the wrong angle. Just along the micro-fissures that had been opened over the duel. It struck with the tolling of a cracked, bronze bell. And Krokata’s weapon disintegrated in his hands.

The return swing opened his body from gut to throat, throwing the Custodian against the Apothecarium vault door in a spray of blood.

Asterion Moloc did not follow up with a thrust to his opponent’s unguarded heart.

In the sparking shower as he had broken the Custodian’s weapon, the Minotaur’s mind had delved deep into a trigger of memories, jumbled and confused.

To a time when another weapon had been shattered. A weapon that, in his mind, appeared as a great black tooth, one foul fang from the jaw of some mad, war-crazed god. And it had been broken by the will of a young man. Broken, just as its wielder’s will had been, rung about by twelve undying soldiers.

The twelve and the thirteen that remained.

A feather from the red angel’s wings.

The breaking of blades and chains are so very alike. And the first breath, after so long, of freedom. And the choice, so long denied. And the action. And the consequence.

‘No,’ growled Asterion Moloc (by the biter bit, by the bitter bite). ‘No. I will disappoint you again, Father. He lives. Do you hear me? He lives! That is my choice!’

The Minotaur tore off his brazen helm, baring his face to the world. His eyes overran with grief, the tears snaking through sweat. He threw down the Black Spear and heraldic shield. There, on a face unknown to any in the Imperium, was displayed all the rawness and feeling that he had never been credited with. For all the dead in his wake, for all the bodies on the road ahead, Asterion Moloc wept.

For brotherhood, he wept and knelt beside his oldest friend.

‘He does not deserve you,’ the Minotaur said, the words choking, halted. ‘Any of you. He does not deserve your loyalty, your love. He gives you nothing but pain in return. _He does not deserve you._’

Krokata’s mouth turned up at the corners, quirking the thin trickle of blood. ‘Ah, Asterion. Are my last words to be a debate on service? Poetic, but… unfortunate. He did not want this for you.’

‘How _merciful_’, snarled Asterion. ‘A price well paid by a corpse.’

‘Asterion. Listen to me.’ Krokata blinked, rapidly, his superhuman physiology struggling against nature to keep him lucid. ‘The Months of Shame. The Palace. I am sorry for all of it. But _listen to me_. I did not stand here for the considered will of some memory. He spoke, Asterion. He guided me to the _Chariot_, to the Wayfinders, _to you_.’

‘No. No, that cannot be-’

Krokata gripped the Minotaur’s arm with a strength born of dying desperation. ‘It is, damn you! The snares set in your path! The Death Guard, this choice, your passage through the Warp -- He has cleared your way as best he could! He has guided to you allies, Asterion! _You are not alone!_’

The Custodian’s outburst subsided in a hacking cough, even the mighty vitality of the Emperor’s finest failing in the face of such catastrophic damage. Asterion bowed his head over the wracked body, the last tears pattering down onto ruined black cloth.

‘Asterion, did you feel it?’

A pause. ‘Yes. The corruption has been banished. The gene-seed is no more.’

‘Asterion-’

The titanic heave of lungs. The exhalation. The deliberate refutation of murder lust, of battle instincts. Finishing your kills was nothing like a law or a truth. There would always be another fight, another day. Another choice to be made. Today, the rope twists black.

Tomorrow, well.

Who could say?

* * *

**EPILOGUE**

The launch bay of the _Aniwa’s Ascendancy_ rang with the shouts and cries and binaric screeching of Mechanicus personnel. Thunderhawks lined the racks, along with a singular Storm Bird painted in the distinctive heraldry of the Minotaurs Chapter. An escort of similar vehicles awaited in the void without, but for now, it remained the sole representative.

It had taken a surprisingly short time to repatriate the Wayfinders battle-barge. There had been little taint to purge: the corruption had been wholly restricted to the Wayfinders, enabled by a corrupt Apothecary.

The vessel would be of great use to the Imperium in the struggle for Vigilus. It was at times like this, Geleit thought, that you didn’t look a gift-_grox_ in the mandibles.

The Primaris Captain leaned on the observation platform’s railing, high above the bustle. He could see the Minotaur’s Chapter Master, Asterion Moloc, surrounded by his nine Terminators on the embarkation platform. The Chapter Master seemed deep in conversation with a wizened, bent man in black robes that looked much worse for wear than the last time they had been worn.

For all his aloofness, Asterion Moloc still reached out a great gauntlet to absent-mindedly steady the man as he wavered after a particularly passionate point.

Yes, Geleit knew that Advisor Krokata would not be rejoining the _Northern Chariot_ when they left. The conversation upon seeing the figure held in the Chapter Master’s arms when Rasek and the Captain had gathered themselves enough to leave the central Apothecarium had been terse, brief, and -- from one bloodsoaked quarter -- particularly thankful for the closeness of a medical facility.

Elaboration had happened later. But there were still unanswered questions. Still, Geleit considered things to have turned out rather well on the whole. A few loose ends did not a tapestry break.

A polite cough sounded behind him. The Primaris Captain turned.

And beheld Rasek Firespeaker, looking simultaneously stoic and nervous as only a Space Marine could.

‘You and Krokata were in on it,’ said Geleit by way of greeting, eyes cold and hard. ‘You didn’t tell me. I don’t particularly feel like talking to you right now, Rasek.’

The Firespeaker had the good grace to bow his head. ‘It was not my place to reveal Krokata’s identity or position, Captain. The Eyes of the Emperor would not wish for their informants to be so free with such things.’

Geleit grunted. It was an entirely reasonable explanation, which made it all the more frustrating. He turned back to the railing, and in a moment, Rasek joined him. They stood in companionable silence, watching the chaos below. A cargo-servitor nearly ran down its red-robed handler, who scuttled out of the way at the very last moment. A work-gang doubled over in laughter, most of all their supposed overseer, as the adept ran after the servitor shaking a metal fist.

‘You won’t be staying on the _Ascendancy_, then.’ Geleit said at last.

‘No, I am afraid not. They could use a good leader, but…’ Rasek spread his hands as if saying ‘well, just look’. ‘That is not me. And I have other tasks, besides.’

‘More black work with the Ten Thousand?’

‘Not quite. There are other masters to answer to. We are pulled in a thousand directions, alas.’

‘Where are Kor and Toc?’

‘Berthed on the _Daedelos Krata_ already. Geleit, I do not wish for there to be… misunderstanding, between us.’

Another noncommittal grunt from the Primaris.

‘I am returning to Terra to aid a true-born brother,’ Rasek pressed on, ‘Who will need capable warriors close at hand.’

‘Does this brother have a name?’

‘Khayon.’

‘Never heard of him.’

‘Ah, well,’ Rasek smiled. ‘You will, soon enough, I’m sure. We were well met, Geleit.’

There were no bonds tighter than those of brotherhood, supposed or otherwise. They had shed blood together, battled daemons, and traded secrets. Their time together had been brief, but all the more fierce for it.

Such is the way of the Adeptus Astartes, and certainly such was the way of Captain Geleit.

You took your wins where you could find them.

‘Aye,’ said Geleit, and the two warriors clasped wrists one last time. ‘We were well met indeed.’

**END**


End file.
